I’ve spent a lot of time researching “anti-designs”, or prosocial design features. https://www.prosocialdesign.org/ has a brief list of a few good prosocial interventions.

I highly recommend listening to the Center for Humane Technology’s “Your UnDivided Attention” podcast. It is easily accessible, and is an excellent resource to learn about designs that could make social media platforms healthier, and non-addictive. They interview engineers and designers who work for Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al., and talk about all sorts of healthier designs for these platforms that have been researched, tested, and intentionally NOT implemented because addiction has proven crucial for turning a profit with these websites.

For years Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the rest have been pouring money into finding an alternative revenue model which does not require addicting and abusing users, but so far I’m not aware that they’ve had much success. It seems the only viable for-profit social media model is to implement addictive design features while conditioning each user to become more predictable, then selling access to manipulate users.

In designing the Fediverse I think humane design is paramount. For-profit social media is fundamentally incentivized to restrict access to content and abuse users, this is a worse user experience, so I feel it is eventually inevitable that people will move towards healthier alternatives that do not exploit them.